The bride's father was not smiling. Tywin Lannister never smiled, it was often said, but his satisfaction, if not necessarily pleasure, was apparent to the groom's brother nonetheless. It was hidden beneath the steady rise and fall of his voice, and submerged under the chilly glare of his eyes, but it was there nonetheless – Lord Tywin's satisfaction at the marriage of his daughter to a reigning king.
Pale green eyes flecked with gold; that was how Lord Tywin's eyes were often described. Were there truly flecks of gold in those eyes, wondered Stannis, or were most observers fooled by the thought of Lannister gold, and ended up imagining its shade in the eyes of Tywin Lannister where none actually existed? Stannis had not noticed the color of those eyes as a boy of four, when his father took him to court for the first time, when he and Robert mistook Tywin Lannister for the king.
There were indeed flecks of gold in those pale green eyes, confirmed Stannis, after staring at them for quite some time. Tywin did not appear to be amused, or even bemused, at the scrutiny. He returned Stannis' gaze with an implacable gaze of his own, as if dropping his eyes before Stannis dropped his own would have been an intolerable acknowledgment of defeat.
"You remind me of your father," he said, in a voice so devoid of expression that Stannis could not even begin to guess if those words were meant as a compliment, or a condemnation, or perhaps even some kind of warning.
"My brother Robert is the one who has our father's looks." You are truly your father's son. Stannis had given up counting how many times this had been said about Robert.
"He has your father's looks, aye, and your father's laugh, but he does not have your father's stern and disapproving expression, when a matter greatly displeased him. Does this wedding displease you, Stannis?"
"Would that matter to you, Lord Tywin, my pleasure or displeasure?"
"No. Why should it? But I'm curious nonetheless."
"I am not obligated to satisfy your curiosity."
"Your father would have been pleased with this marriage. We were very close companions as young boys, in the days when we were both serving as royal pages."
"You and the late King Aerys were very close as well, my father told me. That did not stop your son from murdering him. Closeness between the fathers does not always lead to matrimony between the children."
"Your father and Aerys were also very close, and they were cousins besides. That did not stop your father's eldest son from spearheading a rebellion against Aerys."
"My brother had no choice in the matter. King Aerys called for his head."
"My son had no choice either. Aerys –"
"Called for his head too?"
"Aerys called for my head. Would you not have done the same for your father, Stannis? Would you not have killed Aerys to save your father's life?"
"My father never betrayed the late king."
"I supported a just rebellion. I hear that you are all about justice, Stannis," replied Tywin, in a mordant tone. "My son by marriage was telling me about the smuggler whose fingers you shortened, despite the great deed he performed for Storm's End during the war."
Stannis clenched his jaw. Robert had no right to turn it into an amusing story for him to tell all and sundry, no right at all. Were they laughing about it, Robert and his kin by marriage?
"If you considered Robert's cause to be just, why did it take you so long to make up your mind about which side to support?"
"I'm surprised at your question, Stannis. Didn't your father teach you not to be reckless? That was always Steffon's watchword, caution. Excessive caution, at times. He was always –"
"I am his son. I do not need you to lecture me about what my father was like. I do not need you to explain my father as he was to me, to pretend to reveal him to me as if he's a secret I have yet to discover. He is my father, not yours."
"You were four-and-ten when he died. How well did you truly know him? Your father was also four-and-ten when his own father died. He never truly saw his father for the man Ormund Baratheon had been either."
"And you did? You, the son of another man, knew more about my father's father than he did?" asked Stannis, furious with Tywin Lannister's presumption.
"Sometimes it requires distance to see the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Your father tried so hard to live up to his father's example, to be a good man as his father would have defined being a good man meant. It ended up bringing about his own death. He did not throw his lot with Aerys' dissenters when he should, when there were many voices clamoring for him, with his royal blood, to lead the opposition against his cousin. He sailed to find a bride for Rhaegar as Aerys commanded. He stayed loyal, like his father stayed loyal to King Jaehaerys and led the king's army in his place. He was nostalgic for the Aerys we knew as a boy. He believed with all his heart that the man Aerys had shown himself to be was not the man Aerys truly was. He was sentimental about the past, the past that had no relevance to the present, or to the future. That was a costly error. A lord should never allow sentiment to cloud his judgment, or to –"
"Or to get in the way of his ambition?"
"Ambition is a dirty word to you, I suppose? It was to your father. He could not bear to be thought ambitious, to be seen as though he was striving and pushing for more than what he already possessed. He wanted to be seen as good, not just to be good."
That was not the father Stannis knew, not the father he remembered. Four-and-ten was too young an age to lose a father, but old enough to know the man's essential nature. He was not blind to his father's flaws and weaknesses – the faith and trust Steffon Baratheon retained for both Aerys and Tywin to the end of his life was one of his biggest faults – but the man Tywin Lannister described, the man who wanted to be seen as good, who made a virtue of being seen as good, was a stranger to his son, a shadow of Tywin's own creation.
He twists things, thought Stannis, to make everything look distorted, to claim a superior understanding. He tries to make you doubt yourself, doubt your conception of good and evil, of what is honorable and dishonorable, of what is just and unjust. That is Tywin Lannister's greatest ruse, to make black seem white, and white seem black, and to make the inversion appear as if it is the most reasonable thing in the world, the way it has to be, the way it must be, the only way it could be.